November 2021 - PSDR - mailman.hamwan.org

Receiving antenna for donation to EMA or for sale
by Justin Roberts 30 Nov '21

30 Nov '21

I recently moved out of Portland to SW Washington outside of the HamWAN footprint. I have a complete receiving setup including antenna, base, PoE supply and the sleeve kit. I paid $470 for everything. It has been in service since July 2019. I will donate to any EOC or EMA with a reputable ham that could put it to use or I will sell for $250. I would rather not have to package and ship it. It’s currently located in Portland but will be in Cathlamet, WA in the next couple weeks. I do occasionally travel to Mount Vernon for work and could also meet along I5 somewhere.

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Questions about hamWAN
by Martin 30 Nov '21

30 Nov '21

Hello All, Greetings from SFWEM land. I have been looking at your documentation and it has improved from the last time I looked. Kudos! I am still finding broken links - is there anyone specific to report these? I worked on a OSLR/CDMA Part 15 mesh about a decade ago and am familiar with it's limitations. While it does have its applications, it's not a great idea for a WAN. SFWEM has been building nodes for a couple of years but has never done a network level test. They put up a node, run a speed test and declare success. I've been encouraging SFWEM to conduct a Simulated Emergency Test. I would expect a spectacular failure. I would like to be prepared with alternatives when the AREDN limitations are discovered. I would like to understand your frequency plan. Your site mentions 5.9 GHz. Looking at some of the suggested radios (some with broken links) , it looks like the MikroTik coverage ends at 5875 MHz. It sounds like there is work going on integrating AREDN islands connected to hamWAN. Any information you can share? Happy Holidays, Thanks & 73, Martin Rothfield W6MRR Berkeley

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Coverage Question
by Richard Halley 21 Nov '21

21 Nov '21

Hi There, I am currently researching how best to use my recently gained General license. I live at 7510 Sunset Dr, Blaine WA (actually in Birch bay) and your coverage map looks encouraging. I have easy access to my roof (Widow's Walk) on my 3-story house so can get some height for Ae installation. I am also about to join PNWDigital.net as I have a DRM Anytone D578. I am part a patriot/ham group in the Sedro Wooley/Mount Vernon area and we are looking at ways to keep in touch by radio and gain internet access in an emergency. This all looks promising to me. Regards Richard, KK7BPM

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Gold is down
by carl＠n7kuw.com 21 Nov '21

21 Nov '21

It appears Gold Mountain went off the air yesterday afternoon. I've lost my personal connection, and the Seattle EOC lost its link to Gold, so two independent connections went down at the same time and have remained down. Very sorry to see the loss of this link, and hopefully over time HamWAN will be able to either return to Gold, or find a roughly comparable site. Carl, N7KUW

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Re: [HamWAN PSDR] Coverage Question
by Donald Rotolo 21 Nov '21

21 Nov '21

Hi Richard, The tower you need to be able to see is located near 48.687945, -122.361682. Get binoculars or a telescope and, using a map program (e.g., Google Maps) point your looking glass at the mountain. Looking out the back of your house, it is a bit to the left of straight out. If you can see the towers (there are three, 2 together and one off to the southwest a few hundred feet) you should be good. Note that WB7FHC, not far from you, has what appears to be an operational link. Perhaps contact them, as they’ve gone through all this already? 73, Don N2IRZ -----Original Message----- Hi There, I am currently researching how best to use my recently gained General license. I live at 7510 Sunset Dr, Blaine WA (actually in Birch bay) and your coverage map looks encouraging. I have easy access to my roof (Widow's Walk) on my 3-story house so can get some height for Ae installation. I am also about to join PNWDigital.net as I have a DRM Anytone D578. I am part a patriot/ham group in the Sedro Wooley/Mount Vernon area and we are looking at ways to keep in touch by radio and gain internet access in an emergency. This all looks promising to me. Regards Richard, KK7BPM

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Cell Sites on DNR Towers
by Nigel Vander Houwen 17 Nov '21

17 Nov '21

Hello HamWAN volunteers/users/interested parties, As has been previously discussed on the list, there has been a lot of happenings in the background over roughly the last year with regards to DNR sites. We’ve had several sites in limbo for some time as lease holders worked with DNR to sort things out, and we had some hopeful indications that it would end up working out in the end. Unfortunately indications have greatly soured. As discussed in recent weeks, Rattlesnake and Larch Mountain were decommissioned recently, and we’ve now received official word that we’ll need to decommission Gold Mountain in the coming weeks. As much as I’d like it to end there, we are not holding our breath for Capitol Peak or Blyn. Unfortunately new rules DNR has placed on amateur leases effectively exclude use cases like HamWAN, if they were offering them at all due to DNR budget issues, and commercial rates are simply not feasible. I’m sure folks will think/suggest about additional donations to cover it, but commercial rates would require many-fold our current donation levels EVERY YEAR to make work. It’s simply not something we can reasonably consider. I’m very sorry to have to deliver this news to the many folks this will impact. This is obviously a major blow for the network. I’m thankful for the team who has put so much effort into building out these sites and maintaining the infrastructure, and I’m saddened to see that work torn down. Likewise I know there are quite a number of combined users, repeaters, and emergency groups who are going to be impacted by this. I hope that we can work with you to get you connected to another site where the pathing works. We’re not done. There’s a lot of the core network, and a lot of coverage that doesn’t rely on these DNR sites, and will remain operational. We’ll likely need to do some work to reconsider/rework redundant pathing after this loss. Going forward I’m hopeful for finding new non-DNR sites where we can rebuild and expand once more. If anyone has any specific notes or suggestions, please send us an email at netops(a)hamwan.org <mailto:netops@hamwan.org> Nigel HamWAN

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PUBLIC COMMENTS: Expenditure for Gold Mtn and Capitol Peak Decommissioning Costs
by Nigel Vander Houwen 14 Nov '21

14 Nov '21

Good Evening Everyone, Our efforts to decommission the various sites required by DNR are ongoing, and we are now looking at Gold and Capitol Peak. The climber who has agreed to help us finish Blyn has also agreed to help us decommission Gold Mtn, and we will be looking at availability for Capitol Peak decommissioning work as well. The board has discussed pre-approving climbing and other incidental expenses for both of these sites, up to a total of $1,000. We do not expect to actually use the full amount, but it gives us breathing room to react quickly given the limited weather windows with the oncoming Winter season. This email serves as notice that we intend to move forward with approving climbing expenses to aid in decommissioning these sites as we are required to do in an expeditious manner. This is the membership’s opportunity for public comment before the decision is finalized. It will be considered finalized 24 hours after this message. Thanks, Nigel HamWAN

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PUBLIC COMMENTS: Expenditure for High Speed Backbone Link
by Nigel Vander Houwen 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Hello Everyone, We’ve been making some progress in the midst of all the commotion, and are working on improving backhaul connectivity for the network. This has been a problem for us recently with running out of bandwidth on our links from the RF network out to the general internet. We’ve seen some impacts from this and one visible result that folks have asked about is that we’ve temporarily disabled the various webcams to save bandwidth. We’ve proved out an link that should perform at several hundred megabits, spanning from a gigabit fiber connection in the Everett area to Haystack, which serves as a significant hub for a lot of the rest of the network. This is especially valuable as we work to decommission our Gold site, which up till now has had an RF link to our edge in downtown Seattle. The loss of this backhaul, and the bandwidth constraints we’ve already been hitting left us looking for high performance options. Haystack is already a very 5GHz busy site, and the angles dishes would need to be pointed would lead to increased interference, thus making our usual 5GHz backhaul infeasible. So we have looked to licensing a high performance 11GHz link. These are coordinated with the FCC for 10 years, and do use more expensive radios. We expect total costs to be a bit less than $6k. Each side of the radio link is a little shy of $2k, and frequency coordination/licensing for 10 years is a bit shy of $2k. For the curious we plan to use Ubiquiti AirFiber AF-11FX radios. The board has discussed and agreed that this is valuable for our network, and we believe is a worthwhile expenditure to support the network now and with lots of room for future growth. We have available funds to support this expense, and other growth items without straining our finances. This email serves as notice that we intend to move forward with this project to bring massively increased bandwidth capabilities to the backbone, and is the membership’s opportunity for public comment before the decision is finalized. It will be considered finalized 24 hours after this message. Thanks, Nigel HamWAN

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PUBLIC COMMENTS: Expenditure for Tower Climbing
by Nigel Vander Houwen 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Hello Everyone, As we’ve been making progress with decommissioning some sites as required by DNR, we’ve been limited by available climber volunteer time and have reached out to other climbers for hire that would be willing to help us. Through these conversations one climber has offered to help us finish taking the dishes off of the tower at Blyn at the cost of $200 for the day of work. The board has discussed this and considers this a good use of resources to help us meet our obligations as best we can. This email serves as notice that we intend to move forward with this project, and is the membership’s opportunity for public comment before the decision is finalized. It will be considered finalized 24 hours after this message. Thanks, Nigel HamWAN

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Re: [HamWAN PSDR] A bit of good news for a change
by Kenny Richards 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

Thanks Dale - that is what I thought, but wanted to confirm. The good news is that we have access to Baldi anytime we want. I am guessing there is a fair amount of snow now, but I remember Tom and I being able to drive up last year around this time to replace R1 when it failed. On Thu, Nov 4, 2021 at 8:44 PM Dale Skyllingstad < dskyllingstad(a)harbornet.com> wrote: > Kenny, > > It's located in the Wiztronics tower complex on the north end of the > site. It's mounted on one of the four 25G towers that are tied together. > The router/switch is located in my rack in the west trailer. > > Dale > > -------- Original message -------- > From: Kenny Richards <richark(a)gmail.com> > Date: 11/4/21 5:27 PM (GMT-08:00) > To: Puget Sound Data Ring <psdr(a)hamwan.org> > Subject: Re: [HamWAN PSDR] A bit of good news for a change > > Bart, > > Which tower is the Baldi dish (that points to Rattlesnake/Haystack) > located on? > > thanks > Kenny > > On Thu, Nov 4, 2021 at 2:46 PM Bart Kus <me(a)bartk.us> wrote: > >> Now that Rattlesnake has been decommed, we had 2 dangling dishes that >> pointed at it: one at Haystack and one at Baldi. As it turns out, these >> sites do have LoS to each other, so I went up and aligned the Haystack >> end of things with the Baldi dish, and configured them both to exchange >> packets. Yay for new capacity. Someone still needs to go up and align >> the Baldi end of things for the link to run at max speed. >> >> --Bart >> >> _______________________________________________ >> PSDR mailing list >> PSDR(a)hamwan.org >> http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr >> > _______________________________________________ > PSDR mailing list > PSDR(a)hamwan.org > http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr >

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